Rickshaw by Rabeya Jalil. Image courtesy of ArtChowk Gallery.
A working man in a coarse cap arrived at the front door of the handsome Madison Avenue brownstone of Mrs. Collier, a wealthy retired prosodist of wide renown, to whom he had mailed a poem of his composition. He had not heard back from her, and he had not made an appointment. Nevertheless, he permitted himself to knock on the finely crafted oak wood door of the impressive building in order to personally request her appraisal.
A housekeeper, dressed in a brocaded white blouse and a long black skirt, received the proletarian with some surprise and, following a pause, inquired after his purpose. He explained that his name was Alendale and that he had mailed a letter exactly twelve months to the day, after which the housekeeper recalled giving it to Mrs. Collier; and she asked him to enter and wait in the foyer. The housekeeper ascended an ornately adorned staircase as the man stood uneasily on a fine carpet, holding his cap in calloused hands.
Several minutes passed, and the woman returned, saying Mrs. Collier would spare a moment to see him in her study on the second floor. He followed the housekeeper, who called herself Sorsha, as she guided him to their destination, up the stairs and through a long corridor decorated with vases and paintings, until they arrived at the sheltered, secluded room. Mrs. Collier, in an armchair, gazed at the toiler, discerned him to be thirty-five, and smiled with apparent kindness as she connected the person to the poem.
She asked her housekeeper to bring a small lacquered box, in which she had preserved his writing as a curio, opened the box, and took out the yellowed stationery sheet drafted in pencil and dated September 24, 1909. She said matriarchally that she had scrutinized the poem when Sorsha first gave it to her last fall; however, it was not her practice to correspond with individuals outside her immediate acquaintance. The housekeeper stood nearby and listened intently.
Slowly descending, the man stopped for a moment on the landing half way down the staircase of the brownstone, peered out a window upon the busy street below, and, in his mind, heard his poem, for he had memorized it, sonorously play out before the morning scene.
Mrs. Collier invited the man to sit in a chair beside her. She perused the sheet, affected mild interest, read the lines aloud, and concluded in a whispery declaration that neglect of pentameter and grandeur made for a poor poem. That was all, and she told her guest she was sorry to disappoint him after he had waited a whole year and that it was now time for him to leave. He stood up, nodded, and turned toward the corridor to the stairs, still holding his cap.
The housekeeper, meanwhile, who had made her own assessment, had an impulse to disclose it, and after the visitor was out of view, she urged Mrs. Collier that what the ancient woman said was not helpful, that Mr. Alendale’s poem was a good contemporary poem. But Mrs. Collier was confident and pronounced solemnly that while the fashions of the times change, the standards for great poems remain the same.
Slowly descending, the man stopped for a moment on the landing half way down the staircase of the brownstone, peered out a window upon the busy street below, and, in his mind, heard his poem, for he had memorized it, sonorously play out before the morning scene.
Metropolitanly, people, buggies, trolleys, and horse-drawn carriages going to and fro with the energy of the twentieth century. Women in broad-brimmed hats with feathers; men in neckties, sack coats, top hats, and bowlers; boys in knickerbockers and flat caps; little girls in white dresses, socks, and hair ribbons; and hardy laborers carrying heavy sacks on their shoulders and placards on their fronts and backs—everyone and everything going about their way in the great pulsating engine-cylinder of urban humanity. Then, plowing through the picture, a motor bus swerving wildly and rampantly on the public city road, turning this way and diverging that way amid the frantic crowd, crashing against an electric lamppost, smashing into the side of a building.
The housekeeper dashed down the stairs to the landing window to see what happened. “That is my poem,†she heard the man say. “That is my poem.â€
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